


Or Somewhere In Between

by pukeandcry



Series: Heart of Gold [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Fluff, Kidfic, M/M, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-08
Updated: 2014-05-08
Packaged: 2018-01-23 23:29:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1583348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pukeandcry/pseuds/pukeandcry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The baby won't sleep for him, and Louis tries not to take it personally, but he can't help but suspect she hates him, just a little bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Or Somewhere In Between

**Author's Note:**

> a prequel sort of thing to "crossed the ocean for a heart of gold," and i'm PRETTY SURE if you looked up "indulgent kidfic" it would just be like SEE: THIS THING, so, like. that's cool. or: "how many ways can i describe a baby crying."

“She hates me,” Louis moans. The nursery is filled with the soft gray light of half five in the morning, filtering in gently through the pink curtains that are hanging over the window, turning the whole room muted and blurred. There’s a parade of cuddly toys lined up a bit drunkenly on the window seat, Elephant nearly toppling Giraffe over. Everything smells like lavender and baby powder, and it would be absolutely peaceful if Rosie wasn’t screaming like she was being tortured.

Louis wants to scream with her. She’s been awake for three hours now, which wouldn’t seem _so_ long, except he thinks she’s only slept for a total of about twice that amount in the last two days, all of it in fits and starts, and hardly any of it for longer than forty-five minutes at a stretch. Louis knows. Louis has timed it.

“She’s three weeks old,” Harry says, voice a bit hoarse as he struggles to be heard over Rosie’s shrieks. “She can’t _hate_ anyone.”

“She can,” Louis says, feeling a bit hysterical with exhaustion. “She’s looked into the very depths of my soul and found me lacking, Haz, I can feel it.”

Harry crosses over to the rocker that Louis is holding Rosie in, desperately trying to sway her back to sleep. The movement only seems to infuriate her more, though, every sway dislodging her and sending her into another shrieking fit, but she also shrieks when he’s still, so he’s sort of out of options. Louis feels a bit like he’s holding a tiny grenade, except one that explodes constantly instead of just the once.

Harry drops down to sit on the ottoman that’s next to the rocker, which Louis had forcefully bashed into with his shins earlier in his hurry to get to Rosie’s cot when she’d started screaming.

He thinks if he’d have known she’d still be screaming three hours later -- three consecutive hours of screaming, God, how is that even possible when your lungs are that _small_ , he wonders -- he might have rushed just a tiny bit more slowly.

“I think you’re giving our baby too much credit,” Harry says, rubbing a soothing circle on the knee of Louis’ sleep pants. “Pretty sure she hasn’t developed psychic abilities yet.”

“Yeah?” Louis asks him. “When do those come in?”

“With their teeth, I think,” Harry says, smiling blearily. Louis takes a small measure of comfort in knowing that Harry looks as wrung-out and exhausted as Louis feels -- at least there’s a sense of camaraderie there.

“D’you want me to take her?” Harry offers gently. “You can go get some sleep in the guest room, ‘s’far enough away that she won’t keep you up.” He pokes his long index finger at the baby, prodding at her hand that’s balled into a tiny fist. Louis wants to warn him off, because he suspects it will only encourage a new and different battery of high-pitched wails, if only because nearly everything seems to with her. For the most part, though, she just ignores it, carries on scrunching up her face and screaming at a steady frequency with a single-minded determination that Louis would admire at any other time. She’s tenacious, at least.

“Yes,” Louis says, but doesn’t hand her over. “No. I mean.” He closes his eyes for just a moment, one blissful instant before he forces himself to wrench them open again.

What he _wants_ is for Rosie to fall asleep, but more than that, he wants her to fall asleep for _him_. It’s possibly the silliest, most embarrassing thing he’s ever thought, which is impressive, given the stiff competition, but he can’t help but suspect, deep down in the quiet, unsure part of himself, that she really, honestly might actually hate him. He hasn’t been able to get her to sleep once, now, not without Harry’s help, and while he’s at the point of sleep deprivation where almost any method that might get her back to sleep is on the table -- baby voodoo, hypnosis, minor feats of arcane sorcery -- he thinks that if he hands her over to Harry and has to see her immediately settle, soothing in his arms in an instant, that he just might cry too.

And it’s not that Harry is a magic baby whisperer, really. Rosie doesn’t go down most of the time for him, either. But when she does finally drop off into the rare pieces of sleep she deigns to indulge in, it happens when Harry’s the one holding her or fussing over her.

Louis is trying very, very hard to be logical about it and not take it personally. It’s just that it’s half five in the morning, and it feels like he’s not slept for years at this point, so it’s a bit hard for him to stay objective and rational about the whole thing.

“I can keep her,” he insists. He shifts her from one arm to the other, which produces a temporary upswing in the volume of her crying, and uses his newly freed arm to drag a hand heavily over his face, like he can forcibly claw his exhaustion away.

Harry frowns, the line between his eyebrows furrowing deeply. “You’ve been with her for three hours,” he starts.

“So what’s another hour,” Louis asks wearily. “Or two, or three, or seven hundred.” He thinks if there’s a baby that can keep itself awake for seven hundred straight hours just by sheer force of will, it’d be this one.

“You can keep her as long as it takes me to bring you tea,” Harry says, hoisting himself up from the ottoman with only a bit of a stumble. “Then you’re going to sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when she sleeps,” Louis insists as Harry walks out of the nursery. That’s what all the baby books he’s read had said to do -- sleep when the baby sleeps. Only they hadn’t had a section on what to do when your baby turns out to be genetically wired to never need sleep, or possibly a cyborg. Louis feels vaguely betrayed.

Out in the hall, Louis hears Harry catch his foot at the top of the stairs, tripping with a _thump_ and then a quiet mumbled obscenity.

“Okay, baby,” he says to Rosie, not bothering to pitch his voice over her cries. “Let’s make a deal. You go to sleep for me so your dad doesn’t think I’m a failure, and when you’re sixteen I’ll buy you a car. A diamond encrusted car.” He considers. “With loads of diamonds in the boot,” he adds.

Her tiny sweet face stares up at him, and even as she contorts in it fury, he can’t help but think she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. She’d been a bit squishy and red when she’d been born, looking vaguely like a wrinkled old man, but at nearly a month she’s starting to look more like an actual baby than an oversized prune. Even then, anyway, she’d been the most beautiful prune in the world.

She shows no signs of considering his offer, though, crying just as steadily as she’d been, and Louis sighs, tucking her in closer to his chest. He reminds himself that it’s impossible for a baby to actually cry forever, and that eventually, she’ll stop. She has to. Eventually.

In the meantime, if he cries just a bit with her, well -- it’s not like anyone can hear over her wails, anyway.

-

By the time Harry turns up again, balancing two mismatched mugs of tea in his hands and looking nearly as dazed as Louis feels, Rosie has stopped screaming, but she’s definitely not asleep either. She’s squirming in his arms like she wants nothing more to topple off his lap and brain herself, which is almost worse than the shrieking -- Louis is having visions of her succeeding in his sleep-deprived state, and just the thought makes something cold and awful clutch in his stomach.

“Go to bed,” Harry tells him softly. He sets the tea down on the table next to Rosie’s crib and then takes her gently from Louis’ arms. He wants to protest, but he feels like he’s lost the ability to string words together, so he just nods and lets Harry take her, slumping back against the rocker once she’s secured on Harry’s hip.

“Tell papa he’s being silly,” Harry murmurs in her ear. “He needs to sleep.”

“ _She needs to sleep_ ,” Louis protests. “We all need to sleep.”

“Okay,” Harry says steadily. “You start, then.”

Louis sighs, but he stands woozily after a moment and lets Harry shoo him out of the nursery. He glances back once he’s out into the hall, frowning at the way Rosie’s starting to cry again -- not the bone-shattering wails, yet, but he’s sure she’s working herself up to it. He’s torn between wanting to stay and try to help -- even if he hasn’t any idea how he might manage that -- and just sort of collapsing into a puddle in the hall.

“Go to bed,” Harry instructs. He turns back into the nursery, trying to put a bounce in his step as he moves to shut the door, but then pauses. “Oh, hang on.”

Louis takes a step back in, ready to take Rosie back, but Harry just leans awkwardly to pick up one of the mugs of tea from the side table and hand it to Louis, using it shuffle him back out into the hall. He smiles crookedly at Louis, dark circles smudged under his eyes, and then shuts the door in Louis’ face.

By the time Louis reaches the guest room on the opposite side of the house, the sun’s starting to rise, just peeking in through the window.

He sets his tea down and collapses face first onto the rumpled bed -- Harry’d napped there yesterday afternoon while Louis’ given Rosie a bath -- and strains for a moment, trying to tune his ears to any tiny infant-produced shrieks. He doesn’t hear any, though, and before he can decide if he’s sore about that or not, he’s asleep on top of the duvet.

-

Some time later, he jolts awake when the bed shifts next to him.

“‘S’just me,” Harry mumbles in his ear, sliding in next to Louis. He wriggles around a bit like a fish out of water, trying to pry the duvet cover out from underneath Louis’ useless body and rearranging it on top of them. Louis thinks about moving to make it easier, but he’s not sure he can; his limbs are all leaden with fatigue.

“She sleep?” he asks nonsensically, one eye drifting shut.

“Mm,” Harry says, which Louis’ assumes is a confirmation. “Took forever, though.” He thunks something onto the bed between them -- the receiver to her baby monitor, Louis realizes -- and then squirms closer. He’s lost his shirt somewhere along the way, and his skin is a bit chilly against the heat of Louis’ back, even through his thin shirt. “Spit up on me, too,” he says.

“But then she fell asleep?” Louis asks again, trying to keep his tone minimally despairing. It’s a _good_ thing, he reminds himself. It’s _good_ that Rosie’s finally asleep, and it’s idiotic to feel put out that it wasn’t him that got her to do it.

He must do a poor job of it, though, because Harry leans over to loom in his face.

“Hey,” Harry says, peering at Louis determinedly before scooting them around so he can fit himself under Louis’ arm. “I bet she’ll sleep for you tomorrow,” he says quietly into Louis’ neck. “Or, like. Today, I guess.”

Something twists in Louis’ chest, and he’s not sure if it’s the way Harry sounds like he _means_ it so earnestly, or that Louis can’t help but suspect he’s wrong, no matter how genuine his optimism.

Still. Harry’s right, sometimes. More often than he isn’t, actually. He was right about moving here, to the States and to this house -- their house -- in particular. He was right about Louis looking like a twat when he tried to grow a beard. He was right about how it was time to think about starting their family, which Louis will never regret, not even if Rosie never sleeps another wink in her life. Maybe Harry’s right about this as well.

“You think so?” Louis asks through a yawn.

“Definitely,” Harry nods, slipping a cold hand just under the waistband of Louis sleep pants to rest on his hip. Harry’s nearly asleep himself, but he sounds sure of it, and just for a moment, before he drifts off as well, Louis lets himself believe it.

-

She doesn’t, but there’s a moment that afternoon when she’s weeping in Harry’s arm as they walk her around the kitchen, and Harry pauses beside the oven to lean over her and kiss Louis softly on the edge of his mouth, and for an instant it feels a bit less personal -- a bit more bearable, cradled between the two of them.

-

“Oh,” Jay exclaims, pressing a hand over her mouth. “She’s so lovely.”

Louis rearranges Rosie in his lap so she’s angled a bit better towards the computer screen. “Mum,” he says. “You’ve seen her before.”

“Well she’s still lovely,” she says, blinking hard. Louis rolls his eyes, but smiles anyway. 

He wonders if Rosie knows her Nanna is watching, and that’s why she’s on her best behavior now. She’s not asleep, of course, but she’s not wailing either, apparently content to gaze around with an almost startling alertness and drool messily on Louis’ shirt. He’ll take that, he thinks -- a little drool is infinitely easier to deal with than another barrage of shrieks.

“Yeah,” he agrees, taking one of her tiny hands and wiggling it so it looks like she’s waving at Jay. He can’t help but grin a bit stupidly at the image of it parroted back on the screen, her little waving hand, even when she wrenches it out of his grasp with surprising force. Rosie’s just so _small_ , is the thing, sat on his lap and leaning against his chest in her striped BabyGro -- tiny and fragile, and unquestionably the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “She is, a bit, isn’t she?”

“And where’s Harry?” his mum asks.

“Coming!” Harry shouts from the hall before Louis can answer. He stumbles in after a moment, a gray t-shirt halfway over his head as he comes around the desk. “Sorry, mum,” he apologizes as his head appears, leaning over so he can see the screen properly and wave at her. He drops a kiss on Rosie’s head as he does, and it makes something clench in Louis’ chest even if it’s nothing particularly new. “ _Someone_ spit up her lunch all over my shirt.”

Rosie makes a small noise like _puh_ , possibly in agreement.

“Yeah,” Harry agrees. “You.”

“She’s taking her bottle alright?” Jay asks.

“Like a champ,” Louis says. “Just won’t sleep a bloody wink.”

Harry frowns a bit -- he’s got a weird thing about using ‘appropriate language in front of the baby,’ which Louis finds endearing, albeit a bit pointless, since she scarcely has any idea what they’re saying.

“Well,” Jay says sympathetically. “She’s still young. That’s normal enough.”

“Yeah,” Louis agrees -- because he does know that, theoretically at least. Her physician says Rosie is likely just an unfortunate combination of colicky and stubborn, so rationally Louis knows she’s not, like, _broken_. It’s just that rationality loses a lot of its heft when you’ve been up for eighteen hours in a row.

“‘S’just hard to watch,” Harry murmurs. “Screams until she exhausts herself so much she _has_ to sleep, mostly.”

“Poor loves,” Jay says. “All three of you, I mean.”

“‘S’alright,” Louis insists. “She’s not like, ill or anything, so that’s what matters.” It _is_. That’s the whole -- that’s the only thing that matters, he thinks firmly. Rosie’s all right, and she’ll grow out of her crying, and someday she’ll be a sullen teenager that sleeps half the day locked in her bedroom. The rest is just peripheral. He can deal with not sleeping for the next fourteen years, if he has to. That’s his job, now.

“Still,” Jay says softly. “It’s a bit exhausting now on all of you.” She says all of them, but she aims it mostly at Louis, which he notices, but can’t muster the energy to deal with. He suspects Harry’s spoken to Jay on his own -- plenty, probably -- about how Rosie won’t sleep for Louis, and how he’s mostly failing to not take it personally.

Harry’s always had a dreadfully big mouth like that.

He ignores it, though, because Rosie’s wriggling in his arms a bit more insistently now. He rearranges her a bit, and tries to get her to look into the camera, wiggling his fingers near the lens. “Look, miss,” he says. “Say hi to Nana.”

She burbles a bit more, whacking Louis in the chest with one tiny fist a few times before her face squashes up into something like a frown. Louis knows that look -- she’s either about to wail or poo.

He feels relieved in a way he’d never imagined he might when he realize it’s poo rather than an oncoming jag of crying.

“Eurgh,” Harry says, wrinkling his nose. “That’s foul, Bug. Here, give her over,” he instructs, holding out his hands. “I’ll sort her out.”

“Wave bye-bye,” Louis instructs Rosie as he hands her to Louis. She mostly just goggles at him, and then Harry, who scrunches up his face at her before kissing her nose.

“Bye, darling girl,” Jay waves from the monitor. “And you, Harry.”

“Bye, mum,” Harry calls, already toting Rosie out towards her nursery and presumably a fresh nappy.

Louis settles back heavily into the chair once they’re gone, smiling tiredly at his mum.

“I can’t wait to meet her,” Jay says softly, blinking conspicuously.

“You’ll be here soon,” he says. “Mum, don’t cry, I get plenty of that already.”

“Oh, I know. Just ignore me,” she laughs wetly, waving a hand. “How are _you_?”

“Happy,” he says immediately. “So happy, mum.”

She smiles. “And exhausted?”

He groans, leaning back until the chair nearly tips over. “You’ve got no bloody idea.”

“I might have a _bit_ of one, duck,” Jay corrects with a smile.

“Well -- all right, yeah,” he allows.

“And she still won’t sleep for you?” Jay asks him gently.

He tries to smile, but he knows it doesn’t quite come off. “Not yet,” he manages. What he _wants_ to do is flop face-first onto the desk and beg his mummy to fix it, to tell him the perfect solution to sort this out, preferably immediately, but -- but that’s not how it works, he supposes. He’s got his own baby now, and she might hate him, but he’s the one who has to sort it out now. So he just tries to smile at his mum and hope it comes off as reassuring.

“It’s nothing to do with you, love,” she starts carefully, resting her chin on one of her hands. “It’s just--”

“I know, mum,” he says, cutting her off. “I know it’s nothing, all right, just a fluke, and Haz has told me about a million times, and I _know_ it’ll get better eventually. I know.” He does. That doesn’t mean he can quite make himself _believe_ it, but that’s another thing entirely.

“Just don’t take it to heart,” Jay tells him. “Babies are nonsense little things, you know? They don’t start to make sense for quite a bit.”

Louis can’t help but smile at that.

“Anyway, it sounds like she spits up on Harry much more, so you’ve got that, at least.”

He laughs at that, because -- it’s true, actually, now that he thinks about it. She’s spit-uppy as it is, but Harry does get it worse than Louis does. Half his shirts seem stained already.

“Thanks,” he tells Jay. “That does, weirdly, make me feel better.”

Out in the corridor, he hears Rosie start to shout, and then the low murmur of Harry’s voice, a bit pleading, like he can rationalize her into being quiet.

“Better go,” Louis tells his mum.

“I love you,” she tells him firmly. “Get some rest if you can, and see that Harry does too. And I’ll be there soon.”

“Counting down the days,” he says, swallowing hard. “Rosie is too.”

Jay smiles at him for a long moment. “Speak again soon, my darling.”

“Speak again soon, mum,” he repeats. She disconnects, and then he’s alone in the office, staring at an empty gray box on the screen.

Down the hall, Rosie shrieks, and he lets himself sit in the empty room for just moment before pushing himself up and shuffling off the find the rest of his exhausted, vom-covered family.

-

In the end, when it happens, he’s so tired it escapes his notice entirely. One moment he’s lying on the sofa in the warm lounge with the windows open while Rosie whimpers on his chest, a muted baseball game he can’t make sense of on the telly, and then suddenly he’s being woken by a gentle prod to his bicep.

“Hm?” he asks nonsensically, trying to blink the fuzziness away from his eyes. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, which is disorienting, and he’s groggy and a bit overwarm. Harry’s crouched next to the edge of the sofa, peering at him with an alarmingly tearful expression.

“Shh,” Harry says, gesturing at Louis’ torso vaguely. “Look. Y’did it.”

“What?” Louis asks. His brain feels a bit like mush. He tries to shift around, a bit, but he realizes in the next moment why he’s so warm -- there’s Rosie, pinning him down, dead asleep on his chest.

“Oh,” he says, freezing. He’s immediately afraid that if he moves too quickly -- at all, perhaps -- he’ll dislodge Rosie, make her wake and cry and then this won’t count and _God_ , she’s sleeping, she’s sleeping for _him_ , and he really fucking wants it to count.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispers a bit dumbly, holding himself as still as he can. He hadn’t -- she’d been fussy after lunch, and he’d walked her around the house about twenty times until they were both a bit sweaty in the summer heat, and finally flopped them both onto the sofa out of fatigue. He hadn’t meant to doze off, and he _certainly_ hadn’t expected her to either.

“You _did_ , though,” Harry beams, his eyes going wide and watery.

Louis gazes down at Rosie, his eyes going a bit crossed as he does. She’s tiny and still, sprawled chest to chest with him -- he’d pitched his own shirt on the floor before lying down, covered in spit-up as it was, and she’d been in just a nappy since her bath that morning. The baby books all say that skin to skin contact is important, anyway, although he’s not sure that’s precisely what he’d been thinking about when they’d collapsed down in a heap together.

Her little chest is rising and falling in soft breaths, her mouth mushed open where it’s pressed against Louis in a soft little O, and suddenly Louis thinks _he_ might be the one who cries.

“Haz,” he says instead, swallowing as hard as he dares without jostling her too much. “Look at her.”

“I know,” Harry whispers quietly. “Good job, papa.”

They stay there like that for a long while, Harry still crouched low and sniffling occasionally. Louis thinks he never wants to move, not ever, just stay right here with his husband and his _daughter who’s asleep for him_ , God. Especially because this might be a fluke, and once he moves and wakes her, she might never go down for him again. But eventually his legs start to cramp, and he realizes she’ll have to go into her cot eventually.

“Alright,” he murmurs, steeling himself.

She doesn’t wake as he sits up, though, not even when he repositions her just underneath his chin. Louis can scarcely believe it -- it’s not until they’re in the hall outside her nursery that she opens her blue eyes, peering up at him sleepily.

“Hi, miss,” he whispers, setting her softly down against the mattress. “It’s alright, go back to sleep.”

He assumes she won’t, that she’ll open her mouth to wail, and he’s alright with that, because this one victory is enough for now -- he’s _done_ it.

Miraculously, though, she just yawns, resettles herself with one fist up against her cheek, and shuts her eyes again.

He stands there for a long while, frozen, watching her sleep, almost unable to believe it. After a bit, he feels Harry’s hand on his bare waist.

He doesn’t say anything, just nods his head towards the corridor, and Louis follows him a bit dazedly.

“How did you do that?” Harry asks as they shuffle down the hall to their bedroom. It’s instinct, at this point, to lie down when she’s asleep, although Louis isn’t even sure he’s tired anymore -- he rather wants to stay awake, now, and relive his accomplishment several times, in great detail.

“Thought for sure she’d scream like a banshee as soon as we moved her,” Harry continues, nudging Louis down into their bed. He follows a second later, curling up against Louis’ side like a question mark and clinging to his torso like a creeper vine.

“Dunno,” Louis says, unable to keep himself from grinning a bit stupidly at the ceiling. Ordinarily he’d be more than happy to take credit for something he’s done even if he’s not quite sure how he managed, but he can’t quite get himself to do it this time, still a bit disbelieving he’d managed it at all.

“You’re like, the baby whisperer,” Harry murmurs against his neck, twining one hand in the hair at the nape of Louis’ neck.

“Haz,” Louis says, still smiling. “I got her to sleep _once_ , c’mon.” He can’t help but preen a bit, though.

“Or like, you’ve got magic powers,” Harry insists. “You know what this means?”

“Means that maybe we can sleep for more than three hours in a row once in a while?” Louis asks.

“No,” Harry says. “Well, I mean, yeah, but you know what we can do _then_?”

Louis blinks. “Not die from sleep deprivation?”

Harry huffs a laugh into Louis’ neck, but then licks a stripe up to the hinge of his jaw, biting down just beneath Louis’ ear.

“We can actually have sex again,” he announces happily. “Since we’ll be so well rested.”

Louis snorts. “You’re spoiling a lovely parenting milestone, you monster.”

Harry just shrugs happily. “I can be pleased she’s asleep _and_ that I might get to touch your dick again soon at the same time, all right?”

“I suppose,” Louis allows, and then adds, “you slag.”

Harry just gloms onto him harder. “I love you,” he says. “And I love our daughter, and I love that she’s asleep because of you, and we’re going to nap, and then I’m going to suck you off.”

“Yeah, all right,” Louis agrees. He’s not confident that Rosie’ll stay out long enough for all of those things, honestly, but it’s a nice story to hear, anyway.

“Knew you could do it,” Harry says, quieter, as his eyes drift shut.

Louis manages to stay awake for a full thirty seconds to enjoy the mixture of pride and relief coursing through him before he’s asleep again.

-

In the end, Rosie sleeps five straight hours before waking up to scream. It happens to be when Harry’s got a hand down the front of Louis’ pants, lazily wanking him off, however, and Louis takes a moment to bang his head against a pillow in frustration a few times before he shoves Harry off and reaches for his track pants, but in the end, he’s not too put out about it. As he gets Rosie out of her cot and takes her down to the kitchen for a bottle, he figures its as good a start as any.


End file.
